Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors

Guest post by psychologist/writer Carolyn Kaufman. Everyone talks about angst-ridden creative people, and I've had several readers ask me if angst is in fact a necessary ingredient for creativity.

As writers, it's often very easy for us to talk on and on about our characters' intentions. If we're not careful, we often let our characters' mouths run away with them, as they spend chapter upon chapter sitting around discussing and planning their next move. But guess what? Most readers don't care about what your characters are planning to do. They only care when they actually do it.

Art isn't something that thrives within set parameters. By its very nature, creativity must be free to grow beyond even its creator's initial concepts. When we sign up as genre writers - led on perhaps by our own love of certain types of literature, perhaps by the lure of the money and fame that attaches itself to successful genre writers - we may be making the best possible commercial decision a writer can make in his career. But, as artists, do we honestly want to put the money before the art? Is a career as a best-selling author worth surrendering the opportunity for deeper and broader artistic license?

When Ernest Hemingway spoke about the dignity of an iceberg being " due to only one-eighth of it being above water," he was speaking about the importance of the part of the story that isn't told. Those nine-eighths underwater are the ballast for the tiny bit that juts up to glisten in the sun. And, more often than not, those nine-eighths are almost entirely composed of one of the most important - and yet sometimes overlooked - facets of any tale. Backstory.

We're defined by what we do, by our jobs and our career choices. Mention a profession (mechanic, stock broker, bull rider) and definite images and presuppositions pop to mind. As writers, we can hardly afford not to take advantage of those presuppositions when crafting our characters.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of sticking with a story, even when it seems beyond hope. It is true that not every story will be worth continuing, but every story is worth a second chance. Sometimes the most difficult and seemingly worthless stories are the ones that will explode into brilliance if only you grit it out and keep hacking away at them.

yWriter was designed by author and programmer Simon Haynes, who apparently saw the same needs I saw in my own writing life and was able to use his programming expertise to put together one humdinger of a program. yWriter in the quintessential organizer for writers. It allows you to see your scenes, chapters, characters, settings - and just about anything else you can think of - all at a glance. As an extensive outliner, I've found it particularly helpful in organizing my mountains of eventually undecipherable scrawl into neat, easily accessible notes.

The sad fact is that, with thousands of cliches roaming about the vast landscape of the English language, it's pretty darn near impossible to write a story without cliches. This is a fact. It's also a fact that cliches are pretty much the kiss of death (pardon the, well... you know) in fiction. So how can authors go about reconciling this dichotomy?

Pacing is like a dam. It allows the writer to control just how fast or how slow his plot flows through the riverbed of his story. Understanding how to operate that dam is one of the most important tasks an author has to learn. Without this skill, we end up writing stories that variously lack momentum, feel uneven, become anticlimactic, and seem melodramatic.

We can write the most enthralling story ever told, but if we don't artfully wield the details of that story, it will never live up to its full potential. As artists, we can't avoid looking at the big picture at the expense of even the tiniest detail.

At first glance, it makes sense that the likability factor would be the single most important consideration a reader has in, well, liking a character. But I'm going to posit that likability is overrated.

It's a sad fact that modern society is no longer as literate as it once was—and most authors don't seem to be doing a lot to raise the bar.

Emotional responses, like all of fiction, are subjective. Due to our distinctive psychological makeups and the varied influencing factors of our individual lives, we each react differently to emotional stimuli. We can never expect to tap into the tears of every single person who reads our fiction. But if you can figure out what it is that makes one person—yourself—emotionally responsive, you can likely tap into a universal reaction.

If generality is the death of the novel, then specificity, including the specificity of brand names, must bring it life. But that doesn't negate the pitfalls of branding in fiction. Discover the two of the biggest reasons I decided it was often better to avoid specifying common and popular consumer names.